Auden and the Limits of Poetry, Part II

I have said that Auden was deeply influenced by Kierkegaard, but he gradually came to understand that there were some valuable and necessary things that Kierkegaard didn’t understand. Late in his life, Auden would write of Kierkegaard that, “like all heretics, conscious or unconscious, he is a monodist, who can hear with particular acuteness one theme in the New Testament—in his case, the theme of suffering and self-sacrifice—but is deaf to its rich polyphony. . . . The Passion of Christ was to Kierkegaard’s taste, the Nativity and Epiphany were not.” Auden contends that, while Kierkegaard’s consciously held beliefs were scrupulously orthodox, he was “in his sensibility” a Manichee, who felt strongly the evil and degradation of matter, of our bodies. Indeed, Auden wrote in another essay, with pardonable exaggeration, “A planetary visitor might read through the whole of his voluminous works without discovering that human beings are not ghosts but have bodies of flesh and blood.” And to have bodies of flesh and blood is to live in the world of nature’s necessity as well as in the world of history, of existential choice.

Auden thus increasingly came to believe that we are emphatically compound beings, subject always to natural laws and yet called upon to “assume responsibility for time” by making decisions—decisions whose inevitable consequences are yet another form of necessity. For Auden, this peculiar situation is, above all, comic. There is something intrinsically funny about our mixed identity, as we try to exercise Divine powers of decision and yet always find our bodies getting in the way. “A sense of humor develops in a society to the degree that its members are simultaneously conscious of being each a unique person and of being all in common subjection to unalterable laws.” And this sense of humor about one’s condition is for Auden absolutely necessary to spiritual health. He may have dreamed in his youth of redeeming the world through his poetic power or being destroyed in the effort, but as an older man he found himself, as he often remarked, just a “martyr to corns,” which afflicted his feet and made him comfortable only in carpet slippers.

By the 1950s most of the people who had admired the young Auden had rejected his mature poetry as trivial. But the heart of Mendelson’s book, in many respects, is his demonstration that in this later poetry Auden is working “at the height of his powers,” though in a poetic idiom that was incomprehensible to those who loved the gnomic and hieratic pronouncements of Auden’s earlier verse. In 1948, Mendelson notes, Auden

began to write poems about the inarticulate human body . . . : the body that never asks to be regimented or idealized, feels no abstract hatred or intellectual envy, believes no theories, and is moved by impulses that, fortunately for us, are not exactly the same as our own. He dedicated to the body some of his most profound poems, works whose depth and breadth have been underestimated because their treatment of their subject matter was novel and unexpected in an age whose writers hesitated to see the body as “simply, publicly, there.” And because he learned to value the body as sacred in itself, Auden learned to believe in it as the means and promise of salvation.

“Means” is perhaps not quite right. It is not through the body that we are saved, but we are saved as embodied creatures, and saved for a future of embodiment. Auden came to believe the doctrine of the resurrection of the body a vital one and a necessary corrective to the implicit Gnosticism and Manicheanism of his existentialist influences. But Mendelson’s argument is compelling, and if there is any justice in the world it will put an end to the ill-informed dismissals of Auden’s later verse.

Auden’s poems about the body are often poems of gratitude and thanksgiving. In a poem dedicated to his senses, “Precious Five,” he concludes by invoking

That singular command
I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing?

In one sense this recurrent emphasis on blessing and thankfulness is a correction of the theology that dominated Auden’s early years as a Christian. I have already noted how important for Auden was Kierkegaard’s statement that “before God we are always in the wrong.” In that movie theater in Manhattan, Auden confronted his own infinite capacity for sinfulness as well as that of the Germans. One of Auden’s friends relates that he taught Sunday School in 1942, and once asked the class, “Do you know what the Devil looks like?” He then answered his own question: “The Devil looks like me.” Not too long afterward, he wrote of his conviction that Jesus is Lord: “I believe because he fulfills none of my dreams, because he is in every respect the opposite of what he would be if I could have made him in my own image.” But why not one of the other great teachers, like Buddha or Muhammad? Because, Auden wrote, chillingly, “none of the others arouse all sides of my being to cry ‘Crucify Him.’” Auden never rejected this deep conviction of his depravity, but he came to realize that if he tried to build his whole theology around it he would become, like Kierkegaard, a “monodist” and an inadvertent heretic. Thus the necessary poems of praise and thanksgiving.

It is in light of this sought theological balance that we may best understand Auden’s sequence of poems “Horae Canonicae,” based on the “canonical hours” that govern time in monastic communities and many churches. These poems have rarely been given serious attention, but Mendelson points out that they “occupied [Auden’s] attention longer than any other” work of his career—seven years, off and on—and believes that they constitute “arguably his greatest work.” In these poems, some of which are deceptively casual in tone, Auden attempts to do no less than to encompass self-censure and gratitude, necessity and freedom.

The first poem, “Prime,” begins with an awakening. In this first preconscious moment of opening eyes Auden is (as we all are) an “Adam still previous to anyact”; but he is also (as we all are) “Afraid of our living task, the dying / Which the coming day will ask.” In the next poem he speaks of “our victim,” the one who will do the dying, the one who “knows that by sundown / We shall have had a good Friday.” Writes Mendelson, “The day in which the events [of this sequence] occur is Good Friday, and also any day; and the place where they occur is Jerusalem with its law court and temple, and also the Italian fishing village where the poems were written, or anywhere.” This juxtaposition of times and situations is made possible by the understanding of time embodied in the canonical hours. In them, as in the larger calendar of the church year, unrepeatable events (the pronouncement of judgment, the Crucifixion, the deposition from the Cross) are remembered and in a sense reenacted. But of course this remembrance is done day after day, year after year, according to the necessary rhythms of the seasons and our bodies. Thus the sequence ends, not with the evening prayer of “Compline,” but with “Lauds,” the song of another morning.

This second morning song not only emphasizes the repetitive nature of bodily actions, including worship, but also indicates, in Mendelson’s eloquent words, the blessed movement “from fatal memory to unconditional hope.”

This is no transcendent escape from the physical world but an undignified, saving scramble back into it. In imagining it, [Auden] found himself at home not only in both his work and his body—their reconciliation is one of the private achievements of the poem—but also in the double world of nature and history, neither an imaginary past nor a visionary future, but the place he lived now.

Only if we live in the world where God has placed us can we fulfill the vocations to which He has called us.

Why are Christians so indifferent to Auden? It is a question made compelling by Mendelson’s brilliant and sympathetic analysis. It is certainly true that Auden is not nearly as accessible a writer as Lewis, Tolkien, Sayers, or Charles Williams. Neither, however, is T.S. Eliot, and yet Eliot continues to hold a totemic status for Christians interested in modern literature, while Auden is almost completely neglected. This state of affairs bears reflection.

The first problem is an obvious one: throughout Auden’s life he was a practicing homosexual. After his conversion to Christianity, such sexual activity became problematic for him. His good friend Christopher Isherwood wrote of Auden’s attitude toward his homosexuality that “his religion condemned it and he agreed that it was sinful, though he fully intended to go on sinning.”

This is only partly right. In a letter to Isherwood—a letter that may have been the source of Isherwood’s comment—Auden wrote, “Though I believe it sinful to be queer, it has at least saved me from becoming a pillar of the Establishment.” The comment is illuminating. Auden tried to resist his sexual temptations, but felt them to be stronger than he was. In one poem he ruefully echoes a famous prayer of Augustine’s, writing “I am sorry I’m not sorry . . . / Make me chaste, Lord, but not yet.” But his determination to “bless what there is for being” led him to seek ways to be grateful to God even for his sins and afflictions, through which he believed God to work for His own purposes. Hence his thankfulness not to have become an Establishment figure. He also believed that the homosexual was less likely to engage in the idolatry of eros that is so common among heterosexuals. In his view his sexuality was, therefore, an affliction that bore the seeds of potential blessings.

But however complex Auden’s attitude toward these matters, the mere fact that he was homosexual has written him off the books of many Christians—even Christians who are quick to forgive C. S. Lewis’ peculiar liaison with Mrs. Moore, or Charles Williams’ penchant for spanking and being spanked by young women. The Christian world has its hierarchy of sins, and may be right in its judgments. But it is singularly unfortunate that, even if we have judged Auden’s sins rightly, we should allow that judgment to stand in the way of learning from the wisdom contained in his writings.

In any case, homosexuality alone is not enough to explain the Christian neglect of Auden. More important, perhaps, is his Kierkegaardian emphasis on indirect communication. This emphasis stemmed from Auden’s determination to repent of his, and his fellow poets’, prideful assertions of their own importance. But Christian readers, for the most part, don’t want their poets to be humble: being somewhat Romantic in taste, they tend to prefer their poets to be seers, prophets, “unacknowledged legislators of the world” (as Shelley put it)—just as long as they are Christian seers, prophets, legislators. As they often say, they like poems that are “redemptive.” But Auden understood that nothing and no one is redemptive except Jesus Christ—and thus he called Shelley’s famous line “the silliest remark ever made about poets.” As he wrote to Clio, the mythological Muse of History,

Approachable as you seem,
I dare not ask you if you bless the poets,
For you do not look as if you ever read them,
Nor can I see a reason why you should.

He sent this poem to J.R.R. Tolkien, and in an accompanying letter referred to it as “a hymn to Our Lady.” Mary, as the mother of Christ, presides over the world’s moments of ultimate significance: What can poetry add to the Incarnation or the Passion of our Lord?

Auden consistently repudiated the notion that poetry has any privileged access to truth, any especially sanctified role to play. Poetry was certainly his vocation, and he loved it. As Mendelson writes, “Vocation, for Auden, is the most innocent form of love, a voluntary loss of self in an object.” He knew he would be wrong not to love his work, not to achieve what he called “that eye-on-the-object look” characteristic of people who are “forgetting themselves in a function.” But he would never claim that his calling was superior to any other. In this sense he was purely Lutheran, emphasizing the dignity of every calling before God. It is not surprising that he wrote a poem based on the medieval legend of le jongleur de Dieu, the poor “clown of God” who can offer nothing to the Christ Child but his juggling—and whose offering is received, not because it has special value, but because he gave what he had to give.

As a result of this penitential humility, Auden came to insist over and over again that one cannot in poetry speak the Truth directly and unequivocally. In one of his most powerful poems, “Friday’s Child,” he remembers, in a characteristically oblique way, the martyr’s death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (The title is typical of Auden’s approach: he trusts us to remember that “Friday’s child is loving and giving,” and trusts us also to understand that the old Mother Goose rhyme draws on the memory of Good Friday, when God loved and gave most fully.) The poem concludes with an invocation, and a recommendation, of silence in the face of an evil that cannot be comprehended and a faith that, as Kierkegaard said, can be neither explained nor justified:

Now, did He really break the seal
And rise again? We dare not say;
But conscious unbelievers feel
Quite sure of Judgment Day.

Meanwhile, a silence on the cross
As dead as we shall ever be,
Speaks of some total gain or loss,
And you and I are free

To guess from the insulted face
Just what Appearances He saves
By suffering in a public place
A death reserved for slaves.

The key phrase here, I believe, is “We dare not say.” It is not the same as “We dare not believe”—though Auden often confessed in his later years to dark times of doubt—nor does it mean “We dare not proclaim,” since undoubtedly Auden often did proclaim, in church at least, “On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures.” Auden’s “we” does not refer to Christians, but to poets, whose tendency (as he writes in another poem) to “utter some resonant lie” makes them unfit bearers of the gospel proclamation. As Auden said repeatedly, almost obsessively, “Orthodoxy is reticence”; orthodoxy is knowing when to shut up. This is not a teaching that many Christian readers want to hear from their poets. But Auden knew what poetry can’t do, and always felt the need to put himself and other poets in their proper place. Thus the wittily self-deflating question in “Compline”: “Can poets (can men in television) / Be saved?”

Late in his life, he said in a lecture that he and his fellow-citizens of “The Republic of Letters”—a phrase coined by Voltaire—had but one “political duty”: “To love the Word and defend it against its enemies.” And who or what are those enemies? The “principal enemies of the True Word are two: the Idle Word and the Black Magician.” On the one hand, he came to see much of his early poetry as intolerably careless not only in its technique but in its disregard for whether it meant what it said. It was full of idle words. But the other enemy was more dangerous still. The Black Magician encourages poets to believe that they can be prophets and redeemers. Or, as Auden put it once in a review, he tries to make a person attempt “to do for himself or others by the writing of poetry what can only be done in some other way, by action, or study, or prayer.” Auden uses poetry to remind us of what poetry can never give us. But, in the end, this assigns poetry a genuine and important role, as it points always beyond itself in a strangely mute witness to that of which it is unable definitively to speak. As Auden wrote in one of his later poems,

We can only
do what it seems to us we were made for, look at
this world with a happy eye
but from a sober perspective.